Question and answer (Q&A) platforms usually recommend question-answer pairs to meet users' knowledge acquisition needs, unlike traditional recommendations that recommend only one item. This makes user behaviors more complex, and presents two challenges for Q&A recommendation, including: the collaborative information entanglement, which means user feedback is influenced by either the question or the answer; and the semantic information entanglement, where questions are correlated with their corresponding answers, and correlations also exist among different question-answer pairs. Traditional recommendation methods treat the question-answer pair as a whole or only consider the answer as a single item, which overlooks the two challenges and cannot effectively model user interests. To address these challenges, we introduce a graph neural network model named Question & Answer Graph Collaborative Filtering (QAGCF). QAGCF creates graphs separately from collaborative and semantic views to disentangle the collaborative and semantic information of question-answer pairs. The collaborative view disentangles questions and answers to individually model collaborative information, while the semantic view captures the semantic information both within and between question-answer pairs. These views are further merged into a global graph to integrate the collaborative and semantic information. Polynomial-based graph filters are used to address the high heterophily issues of the global graph. Additionally, contrastive learning is utilized to obtain robust embeddings during training. Extensive experiments on industrial and public datasets demonstrate that QAGCF consistently outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results.

Recommendations usually focus on immediate accuracy metrics like Click-Through Rate (CTR), ignoring user long-term metrics. User retention, which reflects the percentage of today’s users who will return to the system in the next few days, should be paid more attention to. However, most existing methods did not focus on user retention, since their complexity and uncertainty make it extremely hard to discover why a user will or will not return to a system. Recently, a few pioneers have optimized user retention, focusing solely on accuracy without delving into its underlying rationale. This is primarily due to the absence of explicit supervised signals. In this work, we design a Behavior-wise Contrastive Multi-Instance Learning (BCMIL) module, which jointly models clicked and impressed items to capture interpretable user retention. Specifically, we conduct in-depth analyses in real-world scenarios to discover implicit retention-related supervised signals. To model these signals, we design a Forward Supervised Signals Extractor (FSSE) that utilizes a heterogeneous graph, enhancing the reliability of user retention. To mitigate randomness and uncertainty, we propose a Backward Supervised Signals Stabilizer (BSSS) that utilizes overlooked label-part behaviors within each training window to retrospectively guide the training process. Offline and online evaluations of an industrial system verify the effectiveness of our methods.

Recommender system (RS) aims to capture personalized preferences from massive user behaviors, making them pivotal in the era of information explosion. However, the presence of “information cocoons,” interaction sparsity, cold-start problem, and feedback loops inherent in RS make users interact with a limited number of items. Conventional recommendation algorithms typically focus on the positive historical behaviors, while neglecting the essential role of negative feedback in user preference understanding. As a promising but easy-to-ignored area, negative sampling is proficient in revealing the genuine negative aspect inherent in user behaviors, emerging as an inescapable procedure in RS. In this survey, we first discuss existing user feedback, the critical role of negative sampling and the optimization objectives in RS, and thoroughly analyze challenges that consistently impede its progress. Then, we conduct an extensive literature review on the existing negative sampling strategies in RS and classify them into five categories with their discrepant techniques. Finally, we detail the insights of the tailored negative sampling strategies in diverse RS scenarios and outline an overview of the prospective research directions toward which the community may engage and benefit.

This is an erratum for the article “Recommendation as Instruction Following: A Large Language Model Empowered Recommendation Approach” published in ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 43, 5, Article 114 (July 2025), 37 pages.

Dwell time (DT) is a critical post-click metric for evaluating user preference in recommender systems, complementing the traditional click-through rate (CTR). Although multi-task learning is widely adopted to jointly optimize DT and CTR, we observe that multi-task models systematically collapse their DT predictions to the shortest and longest bins, under-predicting the moderate durations. We attribute this moderate-duration bin under-representation to over-reliance on the CTR-DT spurious correlation, and propose ORCA to address it with causal-decoupling. Specifically, ORCA explicitly models and subtracts CTR's negative transfer while preserving its positive transfer. We further introduce (i) feature-level counterfactual intervention, and (ii) a task-interaction module with instance inverse-weighting, weakening CTR-mediated effect and restoring direct DT semantics. ORCA is model-agnostic and easy to deploy. Experiments show an average 10.6% lift in DT metrics without harming CTR. Code is available at https://github.com/Chrissie-Law/ORCA-Mitigating-Over-Reliance-for-Multi-Task-Dwell-Time-Prediction-with-Causal-Decoupling.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm for recommendation by converting interacted item history into language modeling. However, constrained by the limited context length of LLMs, existing approaches have to truncate item history in the prompt, focusing only on recent interactions and sacrificing the ability to model long-term history. To enable LLMs to model long histories, we pursue a concise embedding representation for items and sessions. In the LLM embedding space, we construct an item's embedding by aggregating its textual token embeddings; similarly, we construct a session's embedding by aggregating its item embeddings. While efficient, this way poses two challenges since it ignores the temporal significance of user interactions and LLMs do not natively interpret our custom embeddings. To overcome these, we propose PatchRec, a multi-grained patch training method consisting of two stages: (1) Patch Pre-training, which familiarizes LLMs with aggregated embeddings -- patches, and (2) Patch Fine-tuning, which enables LLMs to capture time-aware significance in interaction history. Extensive experiments show that PatchRec effectively models longer behavior histories with improved efficiency. This work facilitates the practical use of LLMs for modeling long behavior histories.

Negative sampling plays a crucial role for cross-domain recommendation as it provides contrastive signals to learn user preference. Existing methods usually select items with high predicted scores or popularity as hard negative samples to improve model training. However, such methods suffer from choosing false negative samples since items with high predicted scores or popularity could also indicate potential positive user preference. Although several studies devoted to discovering true negative samples, few of them leverage user cross-domain behaviors to alleviate the false negative issue. How to effectively mine and utilize hard negative samples to improve cross-domain recommendation remains an open question.

Recently, many efforts have been devoted to building effective sequential recommenders.Despite their effectiveness, these methods typically develop a single model to serve all users.However, our empirical studies reveal that different sequential encoders have intrinsic architectural biases and tend to focus on specific behavioral patterns, i.e., particular frequency range of user behavior sequences.For example, the Self-Attention module is essentially a low-pass filter, focusing on low-frequency information while neglecting the high-frequency details.This evidently limits their ability to capture diverse user patterns, leading to suboptimal recommendations.To tackle this problem, we present FamouSRec, a Frequency-Augmented Mixture-of-Heterogeneous-Experts Framework for personalized Recommendations.Our approach builds an MoEbased recommender system, integrating the strengths of various experts to achieve diversified user modeling.For developing the MoE framework, as the key to our approach, we instantiate experts with various model architectures, aiming to leverage their inherent architectural biases and capture diverse behavioral patterns.For selecting appropriate experts to serve individuals, we introduce a frequency-augmented router.It first identifies frequency components in user behavior sequences that are suited for expert encoding, and then conducts customized routing based on the informativeness of these components.Building on this framework, we further propose two novel contrastive tasks to enhance expert

As trustworthy AI continues to advance, the fairness issue in recommendations has received increasing attention. A recommender system is considered unfair when it produces unequal outcomes for different user groups based on user-sensitive attributes (e.g., age, gender). Some researchers have proposed data augmentation-based methods aiming at alleviating user-level unfairness by altering the skewed distribution of training data among various user groups. Despite yielding promising results, they often rely on fairness-related assumptions that may not align with reality, potentially reducing the data quality and negatively affecting model effectiveness. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we study how to implement high-quality data augmentation to improve recommendation fairness. Specifically, we proposeFairDgcl, a dynamic graph adversarial contrastive learning framework aiming at improving fairness in recommender system. First, FairDgcl develops an adversarial contrastive network with a view generator and a view discriminator to learn generating fair augmentation strategies in an adversarial style. Then, we propose two dynamic, learnable models to generate contrastive views within contrastive learning framework, which automatically fine-tune the augmentation strategies. Meanwhile, we theoretically show that FairDgcl can simultaneously generate enhanced representations that possess both fairness and accuracy. Lastly, comprehensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FairDgcl. The code can be found athttps://github.com/cwei01/FairDgcl.

With the thriving of the pre-trained language model (PLM) widely verified in various NLP tasks, pioneer efforts attempt to explore the possible cooperation of the general textual information in PLM with the personalized behavioral information in user historical behavior sequences to enhance sequential recommendation (SR). However, despite the commonalities of input format and task goal, there are huge gaps between the behavioral and textual information, which obstruct thoroughly modeling SR as language modeling via PLM. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel unified pre-trained language model enhanced sequential recommendation (UPSR) that thoroughly transfers the next item prediction task to a text generation task, aiming to build a unified pre-trained recommendation model for multi-domain recommendation tasks. We formally design five key indicators, namely naturalness, domain consistency, informativeness, noise and ambiguity, and text length, to guide the text \(\rightarrow\) item adaptation (selecting appropriate text to form the item textual representation) and behavior sequence \(\rightarrow\) text sequence adaptation (transferring the sequence of item textual representations into a text sequence) differently for pre-training and fine-tuning stages, which are essential but under-explored by previous works. In experiments, we conduct extensive evaluations on seven datasets with both supervised and zero-shot settings and achieve the overall best performance. Comprehensive model analyses also provide valuable insights for behavior modeling via PLM, shedding light on large pre-trained recommendation models. The source codes will be released in the future.

Classical sequential recommendation models generally adopt ID embeddings to store knowledge learned from user historical behaviors and represent items. However, these unique IDs are challenging to be transferred to new domains. With the thriving of pre-trained language model (PLM), some pioneer works adopt PLM for pre-trained recommendation, where modality information is considered universal across domains via PLM. Unfortunately, the behavioral information in ID embeddings is verified to currently dominate in recommendation compared to modality information and thus limits these models’ performance. In this work, we propose a novel ID-centric recommendation pre-training paradigm (IDP), which directly transfers informative ID embeddings learned in pre-training domains to item representations in new domains. Specifically, in pre-training stage, besides the ID-based sequential recommendation model, we also build a Cross-domain ID-matcher (CDIM) learned by both behavioral and modality information. In the tuning stage, modality information of new domain items is regarded as a cross-domain bridge built by CDIM. They first adopted to retrieve behaviorally and semantically similar items from pre-training domains using CDIM. Next, these retrieved items’ pre-trained ID embeddings are directly adopted to generate downstream new items’ embeddings. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms all baselines.

In the past few decades, recommender systems have attracted much attention in both research and industry communities. Existing recommendation models mainly learn the underlying user preference from historical behavior data (typically in the forms of item IDs), and then estimate the user–item matching relationships for recommendations. Inspired by the recent progress on large language models (LLMs), we develop a different recommendation paradigm, considering recommendation as instruction following by LLMs. The key idea is that the needs of a user can be expressed in natural language descriptions (called instructions ), so that LLMs can understand and further execute the instruction for fulfilling the recommendation. For this purpose, we instruction tune the 3B Flan-T5-XL, to better adapt LLMs to recommender systems. We first design a general instruction format for describing the preference, intention, and task form of a user in natural language. Then we manually design 39 instruction templates and automatically generate large amounts of user-personalized instruction data with varying types of preferences and intentions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we instantiate the instructions into several widely studied recommendation (or search) tasks, and conduct extensive experiments with real-world datasets. Experiment results show that our approach can outperform several competitive baselines, including the powerful GPT-3.5, on these evaluation tasks. Our approach sheds light on developing user-friendly recommender systems, in which users can freely communicate with the system and obtain accurate recommendations via natural language instructions.

Generative models have emerged as a promising utility to enhance recommender systems. It is essential to model both item content and user-item collaborative interactions in a unified generative framework for better recommendation. Although some existing large language model (LLM)-based methods contribute to fusing content information and collaborative signals, they fundamentally rely on textual language generation, which is not fully aligned with the recommendation task. How to integrate content knowledge and collaborative interaction signals in a generative framework tailored for item recommendation is still an open research challenge.

The graph-based recommendation has achieved great success in recent years. However, most existing graph-based recommendations focus on capturing user preference based on positive edges/feedback, while ignoring negative edges/feedback (e.g., dislike, low rating) that widely exist in real-world recommender systems. How to utilize negative feedback in graph-based recommendations still remains underexplored. In this study, we first conducted a comprehensive experimental analysis and found that (1) existing graph neural networks are not well-suited for modeling negative feedback, which acts as a high-frequency signal in a user-item graph. (2) The graph-based recommendation suffers from the representation degeneration problem. Based on the two observations, we propose a novel model that models positive and negative feedback from a frequency filter perspective called Dual-frequency Graph Neural Network for Sign-aware Recommendation (DFGNN). Specifically, in DFGNN, the designed dual-frequency graph filter (DGF) captures both low-frequency and high-frequency signals that contain positive and negative feedback. Furthermore, the proposed signed graph regularization is applied to maintain the user/item embedding uniform in the embedding space to alleviate the representation degeneration problem. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Codes of our model will be released upon acceptance.

Multi-modal recommender systems (MRSs) are pivotal in diverse online web platforms and have garnered considerable attention in recent years. However, previous studies overlook the challenges of (1)noisy multi-modal content, (2) noisy user feedback, and (3) aligning multi-modal content and user feedback. To tackle these challenges, we propose Denoising and Aligning Multi-modal Recommender System (DA-MRS). To mitigate noise in multi-modal content, DA-MRS first constructs item-item graphs determined by consistent content similarity across modalities. To denoise user feedback, DA-MRS associates the probability of observed feedback with multi-modal content and devises a denoised BPR loss. Furthermore, DA-MRS implements Alignment guided by User preference to enhance task-specific item representation and Alignment guided by graded Item relations to provide finer-grained alignment. Extensive experiments verify that DA-MRS is a plug-and-play framework and achieves significant and consistent improvements across various datasets, backbone models, and noisy scenarios.

Sequential recommendation (SR) has seen significant advancements with the help of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Some PLM-based SR models directly use PLM to encode user historical behavior’s text sequences to learn user representations, while there is seldom an in-depth exploration of the capability and suitability of PLM in behavior sequence modeling. In this work, we first conduct extensive model analyses between PLMs and PLM-based SR models, discovering great underutilization and parameter redundancy of PLMs in behavior sequence modeling. Inspired by this, we explore different lightweight usages of PLMs in SR, aiming to maximally stimulate the ability of PLMs for SR while satisfying the efficiency and usability demands of practical systems. We discover that adopting behavior-tuned PLMs for item initializations of conventional ID-based SR models is the most economical framework of PLM-based SR, which would not bring in any additional inference cost but could achieve a dramatic performance boost compared with the original version. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that our simple and universal framework leads to significant improvement compared to classical SR and SOTA PLM-based SR models without additional inference costs. Our code can be found in https://github.com/777pomingzi/Rethinking-PLM-in-RS.

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are able to elicit user preferences through multi-turn dialogues. They typically incorporate external knowledge and pre-trained language models to capture the dialogue context. Most CRS approaches, trained on benchmark datasets, assume that the standard items and responses in these benchmarks are optimal. However, they overlook that users may express negative emotions with the standard items and may not feel emotionally engaged by the standard responses. This issue leads to a tendency to replicate the logic of recommenders in the dataset instead of aligning with user needs. To remedy this misalignment, we introduce empathy within a CRS. With empathy we refer to a system’s ability to capture and express emotions. We propose an empathetic conversational recommender (ECR) framework.

Recommendation systems, widely adopted in social networks, personalize user experiences through advanced technologies such as Reinforcement Learning (RL), known for producing high-performance, list- wise recommendations. However, RL-based recommendation methods exhibit biases, specifically: 1) Online bias, which stems from a complex real-worldonline policycomposed of various rules and models rather than a single policy; 2) Training bias, a distributional shift resulting from differences between thetarget policyand thebehavior policy. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework named Contrastive Imitation Proximal Policy Optimization (CIPPO) for recommendation based on RL. This approach leverages extensively labeled feedback data and incorporates a Masked Imitation Network (MIN) that closely emulates the online policy, thus reducing discrepancies between online and offline environments. Additionally, the clipping function in Proximal Policy Optimization, combined with a specially designed contrastive module, effectively reduces the distributional shift between the behavior and target policies. We conduct offline and online experiments to show the improvements of CIPPO, providing details including ablation tests and parameter analysis to validate the effectiveness and robustness. CIPPO gains 12.79% on ACN and in WeChat Top Stories, a large media platform with over 50 million users.

Pre-training models have shown their power in sequential recommendation. Recently, prompt has been widely explored and verified for tuning after pre-training in NLP, which helps to more effectively and parameter-efficiently extract useful knowledge from pre-training models for downstream tasks, especially in cold-start scenarios. However, it is challenging to bring prompt-tuning from NLP to recommendation, since the tokens of recommendation (i.e., items) are million-level and do not have concrete explainable semantics, and the sequence modeling in recommendation should be personalized. In this work, we first introduce prompt to recommendation models and propose a novel Personalized prompt-based recommendation (PPR) framework for cold-start recommendation. Specifically, we build personalized soft prompt via a prompt generator based on user profiles, and enable a sufficient training on prompts via a new prompt-oriented contrastive learning. PPR is effective, parameter-efficient, and universal in various tasks. In both few-shot and zero-shot recommendation tasks, PPR models achieve significant improvements over baselines in three large-scale datasets. We also verify PPR's universality in adopting different recommendation models as the backbone. Finally, we explore and confirm the capability of PPR on other tasks such as cross-domain recommendation and user profile prediction, shedding lights on the promising future directions of better using large-scale pre-trained recommendation models.

The emergence of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has greatly advanced the development of recommendation systems. Recently, many researchers have leveraged GNN-based models to learn fair representations for users and items. However, current GNN-based models suffer from biased user–item interaction data, which negatively impacts recommendation fairness. Although there have been several studies employing adversarial learning to mitigate this issue in recommendation systems, they mostly focus on modifying the model training approach with fairness regularization and neglect direct intervention of biased interaction. In contrast to these models, this article introduces a novel perspective by directly intervening in observed interactions to generate a counterfactual graph (called FairGap) that is not influenced by sensitive node attributes, enabling us to learn fair representations for users and items easily. We design FairGap to answer the key counterfactual question: “Would interactions with an item remain unchanged if a user’s sensitive attributes were concealed?”. We also provide theoretical proofs to show that our learning strategy via the counterfactual graph is unbiased in expectation. Moreover, we propose a fairness-enhancing mechanism to continuously improve user fairness in the graph-based recommendation. Extensive experimental results against state-of-the-art competitors and base models on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims at leveraging the correlation of users’ behaviors in both the source and target domains to improve the user preference modeling in the target domain. Conventional CDR methods typically explore the dual-relations between the source and target domains’ behaviors. However, this may ignore the informative mixed behaviors that naturally reflect the user’s global preference. To address this issue, we present a novel framework, termed triple sequence learning for cross-domain recommendation (Tri-CDR), which jointly models the source, target, and mixed behavior sequences to highlight the global and target preference and precisely model the triple correlation in CDR. Specifically, Tri-CDR independently models the hidden representations for the triple behavior sequences and proposes a triple cross-domain attention (TCA) method to emphasize the informative knowledge related to both user’s global and target-domain preference. To comprehensively explore the cross-domain correlations, we design a triple contrastive learning (TCL) strategy that simultaneously considers the coarse-grained similarities and fine-grained distinctions among the triple sequences, ensuring the alignment while preserving information diversity in multi-domain. We conduct extensive experiments and analyses on six cross-domain settings. The significant improvements of Tri-CDR with different sequential encoders verify its effectiveness and universality. The source code is available at https://github.com/hulkima/Tri-CDR .

Recommendation usually focuses on immediate accuracy metrics like CTR as training objectives. User retention rate, which reflects the percentage of today’s users that will return to the recommender system in the next few days, should be paid more attention to in real-world systems. User retention is the most intuitive and accurate reflection of user long-term satisfaction. However, most existing recommender systems are not focused on user retention-related objectives, since their complexity and uncertainty make it extremely hard to discover why a user will or will not return to a system and which behaviors affect user retention. In this work, we conduct a series of preliminary explorations on discovering and making full use of the reasons for user retention in recommendation. Specifically, we make a first attempt to design a rationale contrastive multi-instance learning framework to explore the rationale and improve the interpretability of user retention. Extensive offline and online evaluations with detailed analyses of a real-world recommender system verify the effectiveness of our user retention modeling. We further reveal the real-world interpretable factors of user retention from both user surveys and explicit negative feedback quantitative analyses to facilitate future model designs. The source codes are released at https://github.com/dinry/IURO.

Negative Sampling in recommendation aims to capture informative negative instances for the sparse user-item interactions to improve the performance. Conventional negative sampling methods tend to select informative hard negative samples (HNS) besides the default random samples. However, these hard negative sampling methods usually struggle with false hard negative samples (FHNS), which happens when a user-item interaction has not been observed yet and is picked as a negative sample, while the user will actually interact with this item once exposed to it. Such FHNS issues may seriously confuse the model training, while most conventional hard negative sampling methods do not systematically explore and distinguish FHNS from HNS. To address this issue, we propose a novel model-agnostic Real Hard Negative Sampling (RealHNS) framework specially for cross-domain recommendation (CDR), which aims to discover the false and refine the real from all HNS via both general and cross-domain real hard negative sample selectors. For the general part, we conduct the coarse- and fine-grained real HNS selectors sequentially, armed with a dynamic item-based FHNS filter to find high-quality HNS. For the cross-domain part, we further design a new cross-domain HNS for alleviating negative transfer in CDR and discover its corresponding FHNS via a dynamic user-based FHNS filter to keep its power. We conduct experiments on four datasets based on three representative hard negative sampling methods, along with extensive model analyses, ablation studies, and universality analyses. The consistent improvements indicate the effectiveness, robustness, and universality of RealHNS, which is also easy-to-deploy in real-world systems as a plug-and-play strategy. The source code is avaliable in https://github.com/hulkima/RealHNS.

Next-basket Recommendation (NBR) refers to the task of predicting a set of items that a user will purchase in the next basket. However, most of existing works merely focus on the correlations between user preferences and predicted items, ignoring the essential correlations among items in the next basket, which often results in over-homogenization of predicted items. In this work, we presents a Generative next-basket Recommendation model (GenRec), a novel NBR paradigm that generates the recommended items one by one to form the next basket via an autoregressive decoder. This generative NBR paradigm contributes to capturing and considering item correlations inside each baskets in both training and serving. Moreover, we jointly consider user’s both item- and basket-level contextual information to better capture user’s multi-granularity preferences. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Recently, a series of pioneer studies have shown the potency of pre-trained models in sequential recommendation, illuminating the path of building an omniscient unified pre-trained recommendation model for different downstream recommendation tasks. Despite these advancements, the vulnerabilities of classical recommender systems also exist in pre-trained recommendation in a new form, while the security of pre-trained recommendation model is still unexplored, which may threaten its widely practical applications. In this study, we propose a novel framework for backdoor attacking in pre-trained recommendation. We demonstrate the provider of the pre-trained model can easily insert a backdoor in pre-training, thereby increasing the exposure rates of target items to target user groups. Specifically, we design two novel and effective backdoor attacks: basic replacement and prompt-enhanced, under various recommendation pre-training usage scenarios. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our proposed attack strategies significantly improve the exposure rates of target items to target users by hundreds of times in comparison to the clean model. The source codes are released in https://github.com/wyqing20/APRec.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to leverage the source domain information to provide better recommendation for the target domain, which is widely adopted in recommender systems to alleviate the data sparsity and cold-start problems. However, existing CDR methods mostly focus on designing effective model architectures to transfer the source domain knowledge, ignoring the behavior-level effect during the loss optimization process, where behaviors regarding different aspects in the source domain may have different importance for the CDR model optimization. The ignorance of the behavior-level effect will cause the carefully designed model architectures ending up with sub-optimal parameters, which limits the recommendation performance. To tackle the problem, we propose a generic behavioral importance-aware optimization framework for cross-domain recommendation (BIAO). Specifically, we propose a behavioral perceptron which predicts the importance of each source behavior according to the corresponding item’s global impact and local user-specific impact. The joint optimization process of the CDR model and the behavioral perceptron is formulated as a bi-level optimization problem. In the lower optimization, only the CDR model is updated with weighted source behavior loss and the target domain loss, while in the upper optimization, the behavioral perceptron is updated with implicit gradient from a developing dataset obtained through the proposed reorder-and-reuse strategy. Extensive experiments show that our proposed optimization framework consistently improves the performance of different cross-domain recommendation models in 7 cross-domain scenarios, demonstrating that our method can serve as a generic and powerful tool for cross-domain recommendation1.

Knowledge graph entity typing (KGET) aims to infer missing entity typing instances in KGs, which is a significant subtask of KG completion. Despite of its progress, however, it still faces two non-trivial challenges: (i) most existing KGET methods extract features by encoding the existing entity typing tuples, while ignoring rich relational knowledge. (ii) they typically treat each entity typing tuple in KGs independently, and thus inevitably fail to take account of the inherent and valuable neighborhood information surrounding a tuple. To address these challenges, we build a novel Heterogeneous Relational Graph (HRG), and propose a Multiplex Relational Graph Attention Networks (MRGAT) to learn on HRG, and then utilize a Connecting Embeddings model (ConnectE) to make entity type inference. Specifically, the framework contains three components. Firstly, to effectively integrate the entity typing tuples and entity relation triples in KGs, we construct a HRG that consists of three semantic subgraphs. Secondly, we employ MRGAT to learn embeddings on HRG. In MRGAT, each subgraph of HRG is fed to its corresponding model that is capable of capturing neighborhood information. Finally, given the learned embeddings, we make entity type prediction by ConnectE. Experimental results validate the superiority of our model against various state-of-the-art baselines.

Semantically connecting users and items is a fundamental problem for the matching stage of an industrial recommender system. Recent advances in this topic are based on multi-channel retrieval to efficiently measure users' interest on items from the massive candidate pool. However, existing studies are primarily built upon pre-defined retrieval channels, including User-CF (U2U), Item-CF (I2I), and Embedding-based Retrieval (U2I), thus access to the limited correlation between users and items which solely entail from partial information of latent interactions. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic integrated cross-channel (MIC) approach for the large-scale recommendation, which maximally leverages the inherent multi-channel mutual information to enhance the matching performance. Specifically, MIC robustly models correlation within user-item, user-user, and item-item from latent interactions in a universal schema. For each channel, MIC naturally aligns pairs with semantic similarity and distinguishes them otherwise with more uniform anisotropic representation space. While state-of-the-art methods require specific architectural design, MIC intuitively considers them as a whole by enabling the complete information flow among users and items. Thus MIC can be easily plugged into other retrieval recommender systems. Extensive experiments show that our MIC helps several state-of-the-art models boost their performance on four real-world benchmarks. The satisfactory deployment of the proposed MIC on industrial online services empirically proves its scalability and flexibility.

Personalized recommendation aims to provide appropriate items according to user preferences mainly from their behaviors. Excessive homogeneous user behaviors on similar items will lead to fatigue, which may decrease user activeness and degrade user experience. However, existing models seldom consider user fatigue in recommender systems. In this work, we propose a novel multi-granularity fatigue, modeling user fatigue from coarse to fine. Specifically, we focus on the recommendation feed scenario, where the underexplored global session fatigue and coarse-grained taxonomy fatigue have large impacts. We conduct extensive analyses to demonstrate the characteristics and influence of different types of fatigues in real-world recommender systems. In experiments, we verify the effectiveness of multi-granularity fatigue in both offline and online evaluations. Currently, the fatigue-enhanced model has also been deployed on a widely-used recommendation system of WeChat.

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to provide better recommendation results in the target domain with the help of the source domain, which is widely used and explored in real-world systems. However, CDR in the matching (i.e., candidate generation) module struggles with the data sparsity and popularity bias issues in both representation learning and knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel Contrastive Cross-Domain Recommendation (CCDR) framework for CDR in matching. Specifically, we build a huge diversified preference network to capture multiple information reflecting user diverse interests, and design an intra-domain contrastive learning (intra-CL) and three inter-domain contrastive learning (inter-CL) tasks for better representation learning and knowledge transfer. The intra-CL enables more effective and balanced training inside the target domain via a graph augmentation, while the inter-CL builds different types of cross-domain interactions from user, taxonomy, and neighbor aspects. In experiments, CCDR achieves significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations in a real-world system. Currently, we have deployed our CCDR on WeChat Top Stories, affecting plenty of users. The source code is in https://github.com/lqfarmer/CCDR.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to provide highquality recommendations in conversations. However, most conventional CRS models mainly focus on the dialogue understanding of the current session, ignoring other rich multi-aspect information of the central subjects (i.e., users) in recommendation. In this work, we highlight that the user's historical dialogue sessions and look-alike users are essential sources of user preferences besides the current dialogue session in CRS. To systematically model the multi-aspect information, we propose a User-Centric Conversational Recommendation (UCCR) model, which returns to the essence of user preference learning in CRS tasks. Specifically, we propose a historical session learner to capture users' multi-view preferences from knowledge, semantic, and consuming views as supplements to the current preference signals. A multi-view preference mapper is conducted to learn the intrinsic correlations among different views in current and historical sessions via self-supervised objectives. We also design a temporal look-alike user selector to understand users via their similar users. The learned multi-aspect multi-view user preferences are then used for the recommendation and dialogue generation. In experiments, we conduct comprehensive evaluations on both Chinese and English CRS datasets. The significant improvements over competitive models in both recommendation and dialogue generation verify the superiority of UCCR.

Recommendation fairness has attracted great attention recently. In real-world systems, users usually have multiple sensitive attributes (e.g. age, gender, and occupation), and users may not want their recommendation results influenced by those attributes. Moreover, which of and when these user attributes should be considered in fairness-aware modeling should depend on users' specific demands. In this work, we define the selective fairness task, where users can flexibly choose which sensitive attributes should the recommendation model be bias-free. We propose a novel parameter-efficient prompt-based fairness-aware recommendation (PFRec) framework, which relies on attribute-specific prompt-based bias eliminators with adversarial training, enabling selective fairness with different attribute combinations on sequential recommendation. Both task-specific and user-specific prompts are considered. We conduct extensive evaluations to verify PFRec's superiority in selective fairness. The source codes are released in \urlhttps://github.com/wyqing20/PFRec.

An effective online recommendation system should jointly capture users' long-term and short-term preferences in both users' internal behaviors (from the target recommendation task) and external behaviors (from other tasks). However, it is extremely challenging to conduct fast adaptations to real-time new trends while making full use of all historical behaviors in large-scale systems, due to the real-world limitations in real-time training efficiency and external behavior acquisition. To address these practical challenges, we propose a novel Long Short-Term Temporal Meta-learning framework (LSTTM) for online recommendation. It arranges user multi-source behaviors in a global long-term graph and an internal short-term graph, and conducts different GAT-based aggregators and training strategies to learn user short-term and long-term preferences separately. To timely capture users' real-time interests, we propose a temporal meta-learning method based on MAML under an asynchronous optimization strategy for fast adaptation, which regards recommendations at different time periods as different tasks. In experiments, LSTTM achieves significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations. It has been deployed on a widely-used online recommendation system named WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users.

Personalized recommendation often relies on user historical behaviors to provide items for users. It is intuitive that future information also contains essential messages as supplements to user historical behaviors. However, we cannot directly encode future information into models, since we are unable to get future information in online serving. In this work, we propose a novel adversarial future encoding (AFE) framework to make full use of informative future features in different types of recommendation models. Specifically, AFE contains a future-aware discriminator and a generator. The future-aware discriminator takes both common features and future features as inputs, working as a recommendation prophet to judge user-item pairs. In contrast, the generator is considered as a challenger, which generates items with only common features, aiming to confuse the future-aware prophet. The future-aware discriminator can inspire the generator (to be deployed online) to produce better results. We further conduct a multi-factor optimization to enable a fast and stable model convergence via the direct learning and knowledge distillation losses. Moreover, we have adopted AFE on both a list-wise RL-based ranking model and a point-wise ranking model to verify its universality. In experiments, we conduct sufficient evaluations on two large-scale datasets, achieving significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations. Currently, we have deployed AFE on a real-world system, affecting millions of users. The source code is in https://github.com/modriczhang/AFE.

Cold-start problem is still a very challenging problem in recommender systems. Fortunately, the interactions of the cold-start users in the auxiliary source domain can help cold-start recommendations in the target domain. How to transfer user's preferences from the source domain to the target domain, is the key issue in Cross-domain Recommendation (CDR) which is a promising solution to deal with the cold-start problem. Most existing methods model a common preference bridge to transfer preferences for all users. Intuitively, since preferences vary from user to user, the preference bridges of different users should be different. Along this line, we propose a novel framework named Personalized Transfer of User Preferences for Cross-domain Recommendation (PTUPCDR). Specifically, a meta network fed with users' characteristic embeddings is learned to generate personalized bridge functions to achieve personalized transfer of preferences for each user. To learn the meta network stably, we employ a task-oriented optimization procedure. With the meta-generated personalized bridge function, the user's preference embedding in the source domain can be transformed into the target domain, and the transformed user preference embedding can be utilized as the initial embedding for the cold-start user in the target domain. Using large real-world datasets, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of PTUPCDR on both cold-start and warm-start stages. The code has been available at https://github.com/easezyc/WSDM2022-PTUPCDR.

WeChat is the largest social instant messaging platform in China, with 1.1 billion monthly active users. “Top Stories” is a novel friend-enhanced recommendation engine in WeChat, in which users can read articles based on preferences of both their own and their friends. Specifically, when a user reads an article by opening it, the “click” behavior is private. Moreover, if the user clicks the “wow” button, (only) her/his direct connections will be aware of this action/preference. Based on the unique WeChat data, we aim to understand user preferences and “wow” diffusion in Top Stories at different levels. We have made some interesting discoveries. For instance, the “wow” probability of one user is negatively correlated with the number of connected components that are formed by her/his active friends, but the click probability is the opposite. We further study to what extent users’ “wow” and click behavior can be predicted from their social connections. To address this problem, we present a hierarchical graph representation learning based model DiffuseGNN, which is capable of capturing the structure-based social observations discovered above. Our experiments show that the proposed method can significantly improve the prediction performance compared with alternative methods.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been verified in real-world list-wise recommendation. However, RL-based recommendation suffers from huge memory and computation costs due to its large-scale models. Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective approach for model compression widely used in practice. However, RL-based models strongly rely on sufficient explorations on the enormous user-item space due to the data sparsity issue, which multiplies the challenges of KD with RL models. What the teacher should teach and how much the student should learn from each lesson need to be carefully designed. In this work, we propose a novel Distilled reinforcement learning framework for recommendation (DRL-Rec), which aims to improve both effectiveness and efficiency in list-wise recommendation. Specifically, we propose an Exploring and filtering module before the distillation, which decides what lessons the teacher should teach from both teachers' and students' aspects. We also conduct a Confidence-guided distillation at both output and intermediate levels with a list-wise KL divergence loss and a Hint loss, which aims to understand how much the student should learn for each lesson. We achieve significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations in a well-known recommendation system. DRL-Rec has been deployed on WeChat Top Stories for more than six months, affecting millions of users. The source codes are released in https://github.com/modriczhang/DRL-Rec.

Search and recommendation are the two most common approaches used by people to obtain information. They share the same goal -- satisfying the user's information need at the right time. There are already a lot of Internet platforms and Apps providing both search and recommendation services, showing us the demand and opportunity to simultaneously handle both tasks. However, most platforms consider these two tasks independently -- they tend to train separate search model and recommendation model, without exploiting the relatedness and dependency between them. In this paper, we argue that jointly modeling these two tasks will benefit both of them and finally improve overall user satisfaction. We investigate the interactions between these two tasks in the specific information content service domain. We propose first integrating the user's behaviors in search and recommendation into a heterogeneous behavior sequence, then utilizing a joint model for handling both tasks based on the unified sequence. More specifically, we design the Unified Information SEarch and Recommendation model (USER), which mines user interests from the integrated sequence and accomplish the two tasks in a unified way. Experiments on a dataset from a real-world information content service platform verify that our model outperforms separate search and recommendation baselines.

Real-world super platforms such as Google and WeChat usually have different recommendation scenarios to provide heterogeneous items for users' diverse demands. Multi-domain recommendation (MDR) is proposed to improve all recommendation domains simultaneously, where the key point is to capture informative domain-specific features from all domains. To address this problem, we propose a novel Adversarial feature translation (AFT) model for MDR, which learns the feature translations between different domains under a generative adversarial network framework. Precisely, in the multi-domain generator, we propose a domain-specific masked encoder to highlight inter-domain feature interactions, and then aggregate these features via a transformer and a domain-specific attention. In the multi-domain discriminator, we explicitly model the relationships between item, domain and users' general/domain-specific representations with a two-step feature translation inspired by the knowledge representation learning. In experiments, we evaluate AFT on a public and an industrial MDR datasets and achieve significant improvements. We also conduct an online evaluation on a real-world MDR system. We further give detailed ablation tests and model analyses to verify the effectiveness of different components. Currently, we have deployed AFT on WeChat Top Stories. The source code is in https://github.com/xiaobocser/AFT.

In recommender systems and advertising platforms, marketers always want to deliver products, contents, or advertisements to potential audiences over media channels such as display, video, or social. Given a set of audiences or customers (seed users), the audience expansion technique (look-alike modeling) is a promising solution to identify more potential audiences, who are similar to the seed users and likely to finish the business goal of the target campaign. However, look-alike modeling faces two challenges: (1) In practice, a company could run hundreds of marketing campaigns to promote various contents within completely different categories every day, e.g., sports, politics, society. Thus, it is difficult to utilize a common method to expand audiences for all campaigns. (2) The seed set of a certain campaign could only cover limited users. Therefore, a customized approach based on such a seed set is likely to be overfitting.

With the booming of online social networks in the mobile internet, an emerging recommendation scenario has played a vital role in information acquisition for user, where users are no longer recommended with a single item or item list, but a combination of heterogeneous and diverse objects (called a package, e.g., a package including news, publisher, and friends viewing the news). Different from the conventional recommendation where users are recommended with the item itself, in package recommendation, users would show great interests on the explicitly displayed objects that could have a significant influence on the user behaviors. However, to the best of our knowledge, few effort has been made for package recommendation and existing approaches can hardly model the complex interactions of diverse objects in a package. Thus, in this paper, we make a first study on package recommendation and propose an Intra- and inter-package attention network for Package Recommendation (IPRec). Specifically, for package modeling, an intra-package attention network is put forward to capture the object-level intention of user interacting with the package, while an inter-package attention network acts as a package-level information encoder that captures collaborative features of neighboring packages. In addition, to capture users preference representation, we present a user preference learner equipped with a fine-grained feature aggregation network and coarse-grained package aggregation network. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that IPRec significantly outperforms the state of the arts. Moreover, the model analysis demonstrates the interpretability of our IPRec and the characteristics of user behaviors. Codes and datasets can be obtained at https://github.com/LeeChenChen/IPRec.

The key to personalized search is to build the user profile based on historical behaviour. To deal with the users who lack historical data, group based personalized models were proposed to incorporate the profiles of similar users when re-ranking the results. However, similar users are mostly found based on simple lexical or topical similarity in search behaviours. In this paper, we propose a neural network enhanced method to highlight similar users in semantic space. Furthermore, we argue that the behaviour-based similar users are still insufficient to understand a new query when user's historical activities are limited. To tackle this issue, we introduce the friend network into personalized search to determine the closeness between users in another way. Since the friendship is often formed based on similar background or interest, there are plenty of personalized signals hidden in the friend network naturally. Specifically, we propose a friend network enhanced personalized search model, which groups the user into multiple friend circles based on search behaviours and friend relations respectively. These two types of friend circles are complementary to construct a more comprehensive group profile for refining the personalization. Experimental results show the significant improvement of our model over existing personalized search models.

Cold-start problems are enormous challenges in practical recommender systems. One promising solution for this problem is cross-domain recommendation (CDR) which leverages rich information from an auxiliary (source) domain to improve the performance of recommender system in the target domain. In these CDR approaches, the family of Embedding and Mapping methods for CDR (EMCDR) is very effective, which explicitly learn a mapping function from source embeddings to target embeddings with overlapping users. However, these approaches suffer from one serious problem: the mapping function is only learned on limited overlapping users, and the function would be biased to the limited overlapping users, which leads to unsatisfying generalization ability and degrades the performance on cold-start users in the target domain. With the advantage of meta learning which has good generalization ability to novel tasks, we propose a transfer-meta framework for CDR (TMCDR) which has a transfer stage and a meta stage. In the transfer (pre-training) stage, a source model and a target model are trained on source and target domains, respectively. In the meta stage, a task-oriented meta network is learned to implicitly transform the user embedding in the source domain to the target feature space. In addition, the TMCDR is a general framework that can be applied upon various base models, e.g., MF, BPR, CML. By utilizing data from Amazon and Douban, we conduct extensive experiments on 6 cross-domain tasks to demonstrate the superior performance and compatibility of TMCDR.

Recently, embedding techniques have achieved impressive success in recommender systems. However, the embedding techniques are data demanding and suffer from the cold-start problem. Especially, for the cold-start item which only has limited interactions, it is hard to train a reasonable item ID embedding, called cold ID embedding, which is a major challenge for the embedding techniques. The cold item ID embedding has two main problems: (1) A gap is existing between the cold ID embedding and the deep model. (2) Cold ID embedding would be seriously affected by noisy interaction. However, most existing methods do not consider both two issues in the cold-start problem, simultaneously. To address these problems, we adopt two key ideas: (1) Speed up the model fitting for the cold item ID embedding (fast adaptation). (2) Alleviate the influence of noise. Along this line, we propose Meta Scaling and Shifting Networks to generate scaling and shifting functions for each item, respectively. The scaling function can directly transform cold item ID embeddings into warm feature space which can fit the model better, and the shifting function is able to produce stable embeddings from the noisy embeddings. With the two meta networks, we propose Meta Warm Up Framework (MWUF) which learns to warm up cold ID embeddings. Moreover, MWUF is a general framework that can be applied upon various existing deep recommendation models. The proposed model is evaluated on three popular benchmarks, including both recommendation and advertising datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate its superior performance and compatibility.

Users of recommendation systems usually focus on one topic at a time. When finishing reading an item, users may want to access more relevant items related to the last read one as extended reading. However, conventional recommendation systems are hard to provide the continuous extended reading function of these relevant items, since the main recommendation results should be diversified. In this paper, we propose a new task named recommendation suggestion, which aims to (1) predict whether users want extended reading, and (2) provide appropriate relevant items as suggestions. These recommended relevant items are arranged in a relevant box and instantly inserted below the clicked item in the main feed. The challenge of recommendation suggestion on relevant items is that it should further consider semantic relevance and information gain besides CTR-related factors. Moreover, the real-time relevant box insertion may also harm the overall performance when users do not want extended reading. To address these issues, we propose a novel Real-time relevant recommendation suggestion (R3S) framework, which consists of an Item recommender and a Box trigger. We extract features from multiple aspects including feature interaction, semantic similarity and information gain as different experts, and propose a new Multi-critic multi-gate mixture-of-experts (M3oE) strategy to jointly consider different experts with multi-head critics. In experiments, we conduct both offline and online evaluations on a real-world recommendation system with detailed ablation tests. The significant improvements in item/box related metrics verify the effectiveness of R3S. Moreover, we have deployed R3S on WeChat Top Stories, which affects millions of users. The source codes are in https://github.com/modriczhang/R3S.

Real-world recommendation systems usually have different learning objectives and evaluation criteria on accuracy, diversity or novelty. Therefore, multi-objective recommendation (MOR) has been widely explored to jointly model different objectives. Pareto efficiency, where no objective can be further improved without hurting others, is viewed as an optimal situation in multi-objective optimization. Recently, Pareto efficiency model has been introduced to MOR, while all existing scalarization methods only have shared objective weights for all instances. To capture users’ objective-level preferences and enhance personalization in Pareto-efficient recommendation, we propose a novel Personalized Approximate Pareto-Efficient Recommendation (PAPERec) framework for multi-objective recommendation. Specifically, we design an approximate Pareto-efficient learning based on scalarization with KKT conditions that closely mimics Pareto efficiency, where users have personalized weights on different objectives. We propose a Pareto-oriented reinforcement learning module to find appropriate personalized objective weights for each user, with the weighted sum of multiple objectives’ gradients considered in reward. In experiments, we conduct extensive offline and online evaluations on a real-world recommendation system. The significant improvements verify the effectiveness of PAPERec in practice. We have deployed PAPERec on WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users. The source codes are released in https://github.com/onepunch-cyber/PAPERec.

In tag-enhanced video recommendation systems, videos are attached with some tags that highlight the contents of videos from different aspects. Tag ranking in such recommendation systems provides personalized tag lists for videos from their tag candidates. A better tag ranking model could attract users to click more tags, enter their corresponding tag channels, and watch more tag-specific videos, which improves both tag click rate and video watching time. However, most conventional tag ranking models merely concentrate on tag-video relevance or tag-related behaviors, ignoring the rich information in video-related behaviors. We should consider user preferences on both tags and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph neural network based tag ranking (GraphTR) framework on a huge heterogeneous network with video, tag, user and media. We design a novel graph neural network that combines multi-field transformer, GraphSAGE and neural FM layers in node aggregation. We also propose a neighbor-similarity based loss to encode various user preferences into heterogeneous node representations. In experiments, we conduct both offline and online evaluations on a real-world video recommendation system in WeChat Top Stories. The significant improvements in both video and tag related metrics confirm the effectiveness and robustness in real-world tag-enhanced video recommendation. Currently, GraphTR has been deployed on WeChat Top Stories for more than six months. The source codes are in https://github.com/lqfarmer/GraphTR.